Lost Happiness
by Melpomene blue
Summary: "She had been alone for...well, for a long time. Alone in a cavern deep underground. Alone in a cold, dank, dark hole in the ground unable to see or escape." Rather dark, slight AU
1. lost

title: **Lost Happiness**

author: melpomene_blue

chapter: one

Felicity.

Fel-icity.

Fel-ic-ity.

Fel-ic-i-ty.

Felicity-ty-ty-ty-ty...

The name – word maybe – echoed in her head in an endless loop of senseless noise. It had long since lost any meaning, just a jumbled up cluster of sounds. It was memory that kept repeating it. The memory of another voice saying her name over and over again. At least...she was fairly certain it was her name. It had been a while, she could be wrong. Maybe it was someone else's name she heard in her head. Maybe it was a prayer.

She had been alone for...well, for a long time. Alone in a cavern deep underground. Alone in a cold, dank, dark hole in the ground unable to see or escape. The cavern floor measured no more than ten feet across – early on in her captivity she had worked to learn as much as possible about her prison thinking it might aid in her escape. There was a crevice in the rock high over her head – she estimated the cavern went up at least twenty feet – that allowed a thin, weak stream of light to play across the floor throughout the day. There was also a trapdoor somewhere near the crack of light. Escape had become a distant dream.

Without her glasses, her observation capabilities were severely limited. The crevice that seemed to lead outside was little more than a blurry scar in what passed for a ceiling. The trapdoor near it, so far as she could tell, was the only truly passable means of entrance or exit and had been how she had entered the cavern, very much against her will but also very much overpowered by the large, burly, mostly unwashed thugs who had shoved her through it with no ceremony whatsoever. It was high overhead, maybe twelve feet or so, more than twice her height.

She had fallen through the air into a black unknown, her scream reverberating and echoing back at her, surrounding her in a cacophony of noise. The landing had been sudden, jarring, and overwhelmed her with so much pain that her fear was all but forgotten at least temporarily.

Some time later, she didn't know if it had been minutes or hours, she had been able to differentiate and catalog one pain from another. Head – slammed against the stony floor upon her impact with enough force to send her into a world of vertigo and leave a huge goose egg at her temple. Shoulder – dislocated and throbbing dully. Wrist – bent oddly beneath her as it struck the ground just before the rest of her body landed on top of it, sprained but not broken. Fingers – snapped too far back and broken, swelling freely. Leg – broken below the knee, bone still apparently in place but swelling rapidly. Fingernail – torn, marring the manicure she had just gotten.

Giggles shook her body, creating new waves of pain to crash over her. Of all the serious damage done to her body, it was her broken fingernail and chipped polish that managed to send her over the edge. As much as it hurt, she couldn't stop the hysterical laughter that bubbled up in her chest and aided in adding one more injury to her mental list.

Ribs – definitely cracked and possibly broken.

After the hysteria had subsided, she had fallen asleep with the thought that if she was lucky she would slip into a coma and never wake up again.

Luck had not been with her in the hole. That had been day one.

She had no idea how long she had lost between her arrival in the cavern and waking up again. She had been snatched off the street in front of her apartment in the evening, dropped into the cavern the next morning after spending the night disoriented and locked in a crate, but beyond that...

When she had first been dumped into the cavern, the thin line of light from the crevice overhead had illuminated the ground near where she had fallen, when she woke up again the light had traveled across the floor and climbed half way up the wall. Had it been a day? Two days? Even longer?

Her mouth was dry, her tongue completely parched. A quick, blurry look around the cavern revealed no water save the rivulets of moisture that trailed down the walls and formed small pools on the floor. She didn't want to think about how many little microbes were lurking in the pools as she painfully drug herself close enough to one to dip her fingers in the cold liquid. She brought her hand to her mouth, sucking the water from her fingers greedily. Again and again she dipped her fingers in the shallow puddle and brought them to her lips until her desperate thirst was quenched. Hunger began to gnaw at her stomach but there was nothing to be done to ease it and so she contented herself with the water.

Her first day of captivity stretched into a second and then a third and on and on. She couldn't remember the last time she had eaten a true meal. The day of her capture? The day before that? She tried to focus on other things since even the vague memory of food was a torment. Her captors would occasionally toss scraps to her through the trapdoor: stale, moldy crusts of bread and pieces of half-rotten fruit. At first she had tried to take care of what she willingly ate but eventually the desperate nature of her hunger wouldn't allow her any alternative. She ate what she was given: mold, maggots and all.

She was filthy but had ceased to care. The bright pink and yellow tones of the sheath dress she wore had turned a uniform dark gray-brown. The material that had hugged her figure before now hung loose across a frame grown too thin and bony. Her hair was a tangled mass of dirty, mousy brown that had little to do with her natural roots showing.

No one came. No one spoke to her. No one explained why she had been taken or what they hoped to accomplish with her abduction. No one came at all, not really, except for the rare times the trapdoor would squeak open enough for what passed for her food to be shoved through. Whatever the reasons for her captivity, gaining information was obviously not one of them.

She had tried talking to them, pleading with them, cursing them, begging them, yelling at them, reasoning with them...all for naught. She called out until her voice was a hoarse husk. She mused that they must be deaf, well-paid thugs or maybe they just really enjoyed torturing her.

Unfortunately for her, it wasn't always quiet. Occasionally her ears would be assaulted with an onslaught of screams coming from somewhere beyond the trapdoor. Children's voices, John's, Oliver's, others'... The cavern would capture the cries and magnify them until she was cowering on the floor curled into a tight ball with her hands ineffectually clapped over her ears. Sometimes her own anguished scream would join the throng. Even after she knew the voices were merely a recording, she could not remain unaffected. They tore at her soul until she sat and literally, repeatedly, banged her head against the rough stone wall in a bid to make her suffering end. Only rarely was she able to knock herself unconscious – the resulting headache when she roused was always well worth the accompanying silence.

In the quiet times, she sat and avoided looking at her calender. After the first day, she had cleared a small space on the cavern floor where the crack of light never quite reached. Each day, she would place a pebble in that dim hidden space, one pebble for each day: her calender of days spent in captivity. She never counted how many pebbles had amassed. She felt that keeping track of the number of days as accurately as possible was important but she had no desire to learn the exact number. Knowing for sure how many days she had been there would be nothing short of a living death.

At those times when she was not completely mired in misery, she wondered if they were looking for her. Were they busy at her computers in the Arrow Cave - Dig's words, not hers - while she wasted away in the confines of her own hellish cave? Were they checking video feeds and trying to track her disappearance in any way they could? Did they have any idea how to access all the information that was quite literally at their fingertips? Had they paid any attention at all when she had explained and demonstrated some of the more basic search techniques she often utilized in their quest? Or had they written her off as a lost cause, dead or worse?

It was in those moments that she would begin the tail spin that would start her spiraling into horror-filled depression. Dead, or as good as dead... Oliver had been there, Sara had been there – but neither of them had been trapped in a cavern with no way out. She knew that if she died, there would be no miraculous return from the dead, no family reunion to celebrate her return. Would her mother even have a body to bury or would she be left with an empty grave over which to morn the loss of a daughter who had run as far away from Vegas as she could?

Over the time her wounds had healed as best they could given her complete lack of first aid supplies. Her fingers had healed badly, as had her leg. They still hurt but they were healed. She had tried to align the bones in her fingers but with nothing to bind them with, and given how small the bones were anyway...her task had been made all that much more futile. The dislocated shoulder had been the only thing she could even try to repair with any confidence, relying heavily on too many action movies and throwing herself painfully against the wall until she felt it shear back into its joint with a loud pop and a horrifying wave of pain that had her dry heaving against the floor. It was the only time she had been grateful for an empty stomach.

It was in her dank cavern, broken and so far beyond afraid that she had no word to adequately describe it, that she sat and tried to fight the soul-sucking depression that threatened her with every passing second. But with every passing day, she found it harder to fight against the darkness.

She had discovered a sharp rock that fit nicely in the palm of her hand and there were times she was sorely tempted to use it against her wrist, end her suffering once and for all. She kept it close at hand at all times. She kept it to remind herself that she still had options. She still had that one aspect of control over her situation even if some mysterious force had managed to strip away everything else.

_to be continued..._


	2. found

title: Lost Happiness

author: melpomene blue

chapter: two

Underground caves and caverns maintained a constant temperature year round. She remembered being impressed with that concept while visiting Great Basin National Park when she was a kid. It had been a long drive out of Las Vegas and she never quite understood why her mother had voluntarily gone to the trouble given that it was mid-summer and unbearably hot outside...and their car's AC had given out before they even got on the road good. But they had just rolled all the windows down and had gone anyway and once they had gone down into the caverns it was been blessedly cool despite the weather above ground. She had liked those caverns with their beautiful rock formations and had talked about them for weeks after that visit. She had even thought she might want to study geology for a little while after that.

She didn't like this cave. She didn't like it at all. This was just a prison, there were no beautiful stalactites, no mineral deposits, nothing but misery.

She was cold, not merely cool. She had been cold from her first moment in the cave and had written it off to shock and injury and her continued loss of body mass but there was something more to this chill than usual. It seemed almost as if her captors were dropping the temperature even more, intentionally making it colder. She couldn't detect any change to the air current, had no idea how they could be accomplishing anything of the sort. Maybe it was just all in her head.

She tried to take a deep, calming breath but failed. She was fairly certain that her ribs had not healed properly either - it still hurt to breathe too deeply and so she kept her breaths shallow as much as possible. The negative aspect of that, besides just the poor health and not being able to breathe easily thing, was that it made it difficult to get enough oxygen. She fought against the urge to cough but fighting it was just as painful as coughing would be and she gave in to the fit at last – living in damp and dirty conditions had wrecked havoc on her immune system.

She had been locked in the half-light of the cave for so long now and her health was beginning to rapidly decline that she wondered if it could be death finally calling on her. She wanted to think so but she had been fooled too many times since her capture. Death was the one final escape she really didn't think they would be kind enough to allow her unless that had no choice. Pretty soon, she was fairly sure they would have no other recourse but to allow her to slip away.

Occasionally, in her more lucid moments when she wasn't entirely preoccupied with hoping for death or eying her friendly pet rock, she thought she could detect the smell of salt in the air of the cavern. She liked to imagine that she was somewhere near the ocean. Somewhere clean and windswept with pristine beaches and cleansing air. Anywhere but stuck in a cave and barely alive.

She was laying down on the dirty, slick floor and watching the fuzzy outline of the trapdoor when she heard something new. She was too weak and disoriented to do more than close her eyes momentarily. When she opened them again the trapdoor was still closed but the odd sound repeated itself. She was nearly certain the noise was coming from the other side of the door. The sound was familiar in a decidedly nonspecific way, as if it was something that regularly faded into the background white noise without bringing attention to itself. She closed her eyes again and tried to place the sound.

With a jolt, she woke up some time later. She hadn't intended to drift off but sleep was becoming more and more frequent as time progressed. She still refused to count her rock calender but she knew it was growing impressively large and with each little stone she added to it, it felt as if her waking hours were growing shorter and shorter.

She paused, listening. Yes, the noise was still there. It was almost a distant thumping or a muffled clicking, persistent and measured. It reminded her of a metronome...or of Oliver when he was working out. Odd that she hadn't heard it before now. It brought to mind the old ghost stories from her days at overnight camp as a kid – the rhythmic banging against the roof of the car that the girlfriend discovers the next morning was the sound of her lover's foot just barely able to touch the car's roof enough to made a noise but not enough to prevent himself from being strangled to death – the lover who had gone out to investigate a weird noise and had been hung in the tree under which they had parked.

Sometimes as she lay on the floor of her prison or slumped against the rough walls, she let her mind wander far away. She wondered what Oliver and John were doing. Had they taken down any interesting criminals lately? Had they found any leads on locating her? Had they given her up for dead? Had they broadened their selection of take-out establishments? She also wondered whether Oliver had replaced her yet. In truth, he ought to have done so but the mere idea of being replaced was just a bit heartbreaking. It would have been reasonable though. How had the Queens survived for five years with no information as to what really happened to Oliver and his father? How did they manage to go on? She couldn't imagine that the loss of a friend would be anywhere near as difficult for Oliver or John to manage. After all, she wasn't family.

The noise just wouldn't stop. It kept dragging her back to the here and now and away from her musings. She squinted irritably at the trapdoor. Without her glasses it was hard to be certain but she thought a fine sifting of dirt and dust might be falling from the door's perimeter. She wondered if that meant who ever was up there was working to bury the door. She might be in luck after all...without food, she would certainly die.

Even the thought of sitting up required more energy than she could expend so she stayed exactly where she was, laying on the cold, hard rock directly under the trapdoor and her only hope of escape. At least this way, if someone ever came along and discovered the trapdoor they wouldn't miss seeing her remains. It gave her a small comfort to think that one day someone might know what had become of her.

She gripped her pet rock. It wasn't that she was afraid to use the rock, but if she could just fall asleep and achieve the same result then she couldn't see a reason to cause herself any unnecessary pain. Maybe if she languished too long, she'd change her mind. She closed her eyes again and felt her grip on wakefulness slipping with each shallow breath she took.

It was the noise that woke her. A new noise, something different from before. This noise was not the same as the metronome-like sound from before, this was a scraping, banging sound that seemed to come from just the other side of the trapdoor. She thought there also might be voices. It had been so long since she had heard another living person speak, she couldn't stop the tears that pricked her eyes and trailed into her hairline.

The familiar grating sound of the trapdoor being lifted was accompanied by a good amount of dirt raining down into the cave, dusting her in even more filth. She just remained still, watching to see what would happen next. Nothing was making any sense. This was not the modus operandi of her captors. This was definitely something new.

The trapdoor opened wider yet until she heard the thud of it falling completely open. The open door was accompanied by a blindingly bright light, so bright that she had to duck her head and close her eyes against it. She jumped at the sound of a man's voice shouting. The sound bounced against the walls of her cave and became deafening to her ears, so much so that she rolled onto her side and tried to block out the sound the same way she had with the recorded screams her captors had sometimes tormented her with.

As quickly as it began, the shouting stopped and she wondered if she had imagined it all. Cautiously peeking out at the cave wall, she saw beams of light playing across the rock. They were flashlight beams – her captors had never had flashlights before but she wouldn't put it past them to have created some new torment for her. It was then that she heard a very solid thud behind her, as if something had fallen into the cave from the trapdoor.

Maybe it was another prisoner? Company? If it was, they were certainly more docile than she had been when she had first been shoved into the cave. Maybe they were unconscious. But...there hadn't been the sick crack of bones breaking on impact. Certainly no one could fall from such a height without suffering at least one broken bone. After all, she had suffered so much damage

The feel of a tentative hand against her shoulder brought her to instant life. Unused for longer than she could remember, her voice sounded almost foreign and feral even to her own ears and she screamed in absolute terror. She scrambled out of the bright light with more speed than she had even thought possible given her poorly healed broken bones. Trembling in fear, her heart thudding dangerously fast and loud in her chest, she pressed herself as close to the wall as possible. There was no escape and she was in no shape to defend herself.

It wasn't until she was forced to stop screaming long enough to take a breath that she could hear the voice of her visitor whispering soothing words. They had followed her across the cave and she could feel hands gently gripping her face but the light was still to bright for her to be able to see anything. But the voice was familiar and the touch...it was familiar as well. She tried to squint at the face in front of her but it was just too bright for her to be able to see anything but vague shapes.

"Here, shhhh..." The person waved his arm wildly above his head and the painful light dimmed until it was almost as faint as the cave had been throughout her time there. Her hands were gently caught up in a calloused palm and the very familiar shape of her glasses miraculously appeared. They gently helped her to flip open the temples and slip them on.

For the first time since that night she had been snagged after parking her car, she could see clearly. The lenses had smudges and fingerprints but it didn't matter. She could see. She allowed her eyes to drift up toward the face of the person who had given her back her vision. Closing her eyes as soon as she was able to focus on his. She slumped backward without ceremony.

"Felicity!"


	3. warmth

title: Lost Happiness

author: melpomene blue

chapter: three

She wasn't cold anymore. That was quite possibly the first coherent thought to take hold in her jumbled thoughts – without a doubt, it was the most wonderful thought ever to have been conceived. Not only was she no longer cold, she could feel a plush warmth helping to press her into a downy-soft cloud of more warmth. It had been so long since she had been warm, so very long...

She almost allowed her eyes to flutter open but a sudden spike of fear tugged at her – what if this were nothing more than some highly intricate, intense illusion created by her own brain in frantic desperation. What if she was still buried deep in that cold tomb of a cave.

Without a second thought, she allowed sleep to pull her back from consciousness again. She would open her eyes when she felt stronger, more up to the challenge of facing her dream and the possibility that it was actually a new twist on the same old nightmare.

The next time she roused, she was able to detect more than just soft warmth. Some of her old aches and pains had awoken anew and, even with her elective-blindness, she could detect various kinds of bandages, even steri-strips and possible stitches. A breathing mask covered her mouth and nose, the gentle but stale swirling air trying to dry our her mouth and sinuses even more than they already were. Adjusting her head slightly, she could feel the smooth locks of her hair shift and settle against her neck and shoulder. She felt clean, her skin and hair, it had been so long since she had felt clean.

There were noises as well, sounds she steadfastly ignored as she tried to compile her mental list of things she felt. Allowing her brain to change direction, she worked to separate each sound, beginning with the ones least likely to draw any emotion.

Medical equipment beeped and hummed away in easy contentment somewhere near where she lay. The heart monitor was slowly speeding up though so she worked to relax before anyone realized she no longer slept. There was another humming some distance beyond the medical equipment, a thrumming that sounded very deceptively like her computers in the lair beneath Verdant. There were also footsteps pacing back and forth in a seemingly endless flux between where she lay and another point some distance away. She also heard voices.

It was, above all else, the voices that frightened her the most. It wasn't that the voices themselves were frightening or threatening in any way but rather exactly the opposite. The voices promised safety, security, protection, friendship – everything she had been without.

Stuck down in that cave, she had thought many times that she had heard her friends somewhere on the other side of that terrible trapdoor. Every time she thought she heard their familiar voices she would cry out for help. The first few times she did this, nothing happened. Then her captors changed things up just a little: she would hear the familiar voices, she would call out, the trapdoor would open just enough for her captors to take action. Sometimes it was a pot of boiling water tossed down on her, other times it was a thick cloud of pepper spray released into her prison – she learned to remain silent.

The voice she heard sounded so very much like Oliver that she couldn't stand the torment any more and allowed her eyes to open slightly so that she could peer out at the world around her. If this was all a dream, she was prepared to bring it into reality and wake up.

It was difficult to be positive but it looked like she was in the so-called Arrow Cave. The lights had been lowered drastically and her glasses were again missing so it was more difficult to be certain but it seemed right. Someone was standing between where she lay and her bank of computers, the mystery someone had stopped pacing but was still talking softly on the phone, their back turned to her. She was willing to bet the mystery someone was Oliver but still didn't know if she was quite up to testing her theory lest she be proven very wrong.

Gritting her teeth, she shoved aside her anxiety and very slowly managed to reach up high enough to pull the oxygen mask away from her face. She kept her movements almost completely silent, any rustling of blankets or linens was thankfully covered up by the sounds of the medical equipment. With her world still spinning out of control all around her, she was desperately clinging to anything she still had control of – her pet rock was missing but she could control how much noise she made.

"Ol-Oliver?" Her voice sounded like gravel on sandpaper and she cringed from the sound of it in her own ears.

Almost as soon as she opened her mouth to speak, Oliver spun on his heel and quickly crossed the distance separating them. "Felicity. You're awake."

She tried to swallow but her throat felt too dry and swollen. She blinked – her eyes felt no better than her voice sounded – and silently wished for her glasses. As if by miraculous intervention, Oliver gently lifted her glasses from a nearby medical stand and eased them onto her face.

"Better?" He kept his voice soft and she wondered why but settled for nodding slightly.

The world was again in focus and she was nearly undone by the simple pleasure of unhindered sight. She met Oliver's eyes and felt the tears threatening to fall.

"Shhh... It's okay. You're safe." He reached out and cupped her cheek in his hand as the first tear trailed down her cheek. "Are you in pain?" He reached for a pre-filled syringe and prepared to add it to the IV line she had just noticed.

She watched him as if she were in a dream. She could feel a ghost of a smile soften the line of her lips. "Asprins."

"Something even better." John patted her arm affectionately and she might have jumped had she not been so weak. As it was, her fight or fright instinct had completely abandoned her in favor of a more deer caught in the headlights reaction without the anxiety and sheer terror.

She glanced down at her hand. The sight of her misshapen fingers had become such an every day, normal sight that the thick white gauze bandages that bound her whole hand seemed more alien to her than the mangled digits had.

"The doctors fixed them in surgery. They say your hand will be as good as new in almost no time," John offered quietly, his voice just as soft as Oliver's. "They fixed a lot of things."

She allowed her gaze to trail along the length of her body. Everything seemed so foreign. Her previously broken leg was in traction and not an inch of flesh was to be seen anywhere thanks to a multitude of bandages starting at all ten toes and stretching to the soft blanket that covered her legs, both hands and arms were swaddled and she could only imagine how the rest of her body looked. She probed her skull with her uninjured fingers.

"You're lucky to be alive after that head trauma. Not everyone would be."

She dropped her gaze.

"You _were_ lucky, Felicity. I know it didn't feel like it down in that cave and I know it probably doesn't feel like it now but it's the truth."

She lifted her gaze again to meet his kind eyes and swallowed raggedly. "H-how?"

"Here." Oliver's hand appeared out of nowhere with a cup of water and a straw.

"But just sips," John cautioned.

It was nothing short of torture but she only took small sips until her parched throat felt more capable of speech. "How long?"

"How long were you missing?"

She shook her head sharply, feeling the panic welling up in her chest. She didn't want to know how long it had been, at least not yet. A flash of memory threatened to overwhelm her – dragging herself across the floor of the cave in the dim, dusty light to add yet another stone to her growing pyramid of pebbles.

"How long have you been back?"

She nodded slowly.

"Just over a week. You were in the hospital until yesterday. Oliver arranged to have you moved here last night. He thought you might prefer familiar surroundings but if you'd rather go back to the hospital..."

"This is fine," she whispered roughly with an added shake of her head. "Better than a hospital. Darker." She waved her hand vaguely at the overhead lighting before letting her hand fall back to her side. Keeping her voice whisper-soft, she added, "I don't want to know how long it was, maybe later when I'm feeling...better. I kept track. There was a pile of pebbles..."

Oliver touched her shoulder, drawing her attention. "I saw it. Smart. I also saw the messages, Felicity."

"I thought I was going to die down there." She swallowed again, accepting the straw when Oliver raised the water glass to her mouth again. "I didn't want anything left unsaid."

Oliver closed his eyes briefly and ducked his head. "I'm sorry it took so long-"

"I don't want to know how long. Right now I don't even want to know why or who. I think I just want to sleep some more. Can I just go back to sleep?"

John moved next to Oliver. "Yeah, you can sleep. Of course you can. If you get hungry just say the word. We've stocked up on broth and jello." He smiled in encouragement.

She nodded and snuggled down into the soft bed. She knew she would have to face the harsh facts of her abduction eventually but just now she didn't even want to think about it. It was all just far too much to take in. She just wanted to sleep and forget that anything so horrific had happened to her at all.


	4. how long

title: Lost Happiness

author: melpomene blue

chapter: four

Every time she fell asleep she lost more time. While sleep was her best and easiest escape mechanism, she hated not knowing how much time had passed between falling asleep and waking up. What she found even more disturbing was that every time she awoke up she would find that both Oliver and John were still present. It seemed to her that at least one of them should have left for the comfort of their own home and bed at some point since her return. That they were both always present made no sense to her at all and it did nothing to help her figure out the passage of time.

After everything she had survived, what she wanted more than anything else was normalcy. This, whatever was going on with Oliver and Dig – it wasn't normal. If her leg weren't so well immobilized, she would just drag herself out of the bed, plop down at her computers and dare them to say anything to her, dare them to challenge her, dare them to question her quest for regaining normal. As it was, she itched to get her hands on her tablet at least.

She shifted her weight against the mattress and tugged the blankets up just a little higher – she wasn't willing to risk even a second of warmth now that it was attainable. Her glasses were close at hand and she slipped them on as silently as possible. Noting that she had not yet drawn either man's attention, she took the time to study them more closely. There was a tenseness to them both – something in the way they stood and moved, something in their expressions, in the creases of their eyes and set of their mouths. It was almost as if they were still wound up tighter than springs. They both looked even more grim than they usually did – and that was really saying something given how they all spent their nights.

She was still watching them when Oliver turned around. "Felicity, hey. How do you feel?"

She shrugged. "Better, a little. Definitely warmer..." she allowed her sentence to trail off incomplete. Her throat still felt swollen and her voice was hoarse but that wasn't what held her tongue.

He reached out and wrapped his fingers around her wrist in a comforting squeeze. "You know that if you want to talk about...anything..." If nothing else could be said about her partner, he was certainly consistent...persistent too.

She froze and shook her head sharply. "No. I don't. I'm okay."

A distant, pained expression shadowed Oliver's eyes when he nodded and squeezed her wrist once more before releasing his grip. "Talking about what happened – it won't make you weak, Felicity. You could _never_ be weak. What you lived through in that cave...talking could help." Yep, definitely persistent.

"I don't want to talk about it." She made sure to enunciate each word very carefully so there could be no confusion as to her meaning. Had she felt stronger she would have used her loud voice but, as it was, she could barely choke out an intelligible whisper.

"When you do..."

"I won't." She clutched the blankets so tightly that her knuckles were white and bloodless against her already pallid, sickly skin tone. The death-grip sent bolts of pain through her fingers and up into her arms but she couldn't convince herself to care enough to release her grip.

"Felicity." He lightly brushed his fingers against her shoulder.

She shuddered involuntarily and jerked away from his gentle touch. There had been a time that she had, she didn't know if enjoyed was quite the right word, but she had liked the way he said her name and appreciated his rare affectionate touches. The people who had taken her captive had destroyed even those small pleasures.

The heart monitor gave away her skyrocketing anxiety, the rhythm quickening until John and Oliver both became alarmed. She didn't care how much it worried them; friends or not they were both being way too pushy. They needed to back off – right now, if not sooner. They had no idea how much she simply wanted to ignore what she had been through, how much she needed to ignore that it had ever happened irregardless of how much they wanted her to talk about it. Her subconscious mind agreed with them, acknowledged that they were right, but even thinking about talking about her ordeal threw her into a blind panic. There were things she was ashamed of and embarrassed by, things she couldn't bear for them to know...things that, if she could help it, they would never know.

"I don't want to talk about it. _You_ never talk about the island, _I'm_ not going to talk about the cave. We all have our secrets and I don't have to share mine any more than you have to share yours." It was the most she had said at one time since her return.

"Okay, Felicity. It's okay." John stepped up to the opposite side of the bed from Oliver, drawing her attention. He gave her a small smile of reassurance. "You don't have to talk about anything if you don't want to."

She eyed him with open distrust.

"Felicity?" John maintained eye contact with her even as he moved closer to her side. He stopped moving only when he came into contact with the side of the bed. "Would you like your tablet? We kept it charged for you." He raised the item in question and set it on her lap.

"Thank you." She hadn't meant to whisper so softly – she sounded pathetic, she could hardly hear her own words. Clutching the piece of electronics as tightly as she could manage given the condition of her re-healing fingers and how sore they were from clinging to the blanket, she slid her gaze toward Oliver.

"Diggle's right, Felicity. You don't have to talk if you don't want to. Just remember that if you ever need someone to talk to about your day: I'm always available."

She nodded solemnly.

Typing one-handed slowed her down only marginally. Soon enough, she was so deeply immersed in re-familiarizing herself with her scans and programs that everything else around her melted into white noise. She relished the ability to lose herself so completely and be able to push back all the torment of the past...however long it was. She kept at it until physical exhaustion and pure pain forced her to put her tablet aside.

"I lied."

"What?" She opened her eyes and squinted up at John. He and Oliver had been on the mat for a good portion of the morning and she had blocked them from her notice so well that she hadn't realized they had stopped sparring. She knew she was simply too exhausted to keep her expression blank. She had never been able to keep her feelings secret even under the best of circumstances and this was certainly nothing close to the best of circumstances.

"I lied," he repeated. He pulled her chair up beside the bed and settled down into it. "I agreed with you before since it seemed so important to you. But," he gestured to the room at large, "I convinced Oliver to go home to check on Thea and get some rest so it's just the two of us here now and you need to talk."

"No, I don't." She could feel the blind panic welling up in her chest and threatening to choke the breath from her.

He reached out and snagged her hand, not in an unbreakable grip but in a firm one. "Felicity Megan Smoak, you are not the quiet, brooding type, that would be Oliver's specialty."

"But..."

"There are no buts. Oliver was right, you know: talking about what happened down in that cave will not make you weak. After surviving what you did, nothing could make you appear weak."

She dropped her gaze to stare at John's hand holding her own. The bandages looked so very white against her friend's fingers.

"Felicity, it's been more than a week and you're not recovering, you're just surviving. I know what happened physically – I was there when the doctors explained what they had to do. I know how much damage was done to you. What they had to repair..."

She drew in a quick, ragged breath, snatching her hand away from John and curling in on herself as much as she was able.

"I know it won't be easy at first and you don't have to talk about what happened to you but you do have to talk." He touched her chin until she raised her head enough to meet his eyes. "Brooding silently is only going to tear you up inside, Felicity. Look at what it's done to Oliver."

She shook her head. "I can't. I just can't."

He just wouldn't let up. "Yes, you can. And you can start by asking those questions I know are bouncing around in that brain of yours."

"Dig, I can't."

"Why not? What harm could it do?"

She allowed the blinding fear to fill her eyes before she replied, "It could destroy me."

"Not a chance." He shook his head and took one of her hands in both of his. The last doctor to visit Felicity had said that physically she was recovering well but he was growing worried about her mental health. "You're a fighter, girl. You're a survivor. You just need to remember that yourself."

"But I gave up, not as in threw in with my captors in some kind of freakish Stockholm Syndrome thing, but I literally gave up. I wanted to die, John. I wanted to be dead, to never have to get out of that cave and face everything."

John nodded again as she fell to silence. "Felicity, you were held captive for eighteen weeks. There's not a soul alive who would have still held out hope, not in those circumstances. And I'm sorry for bringing up how long you were gone but I think you were letting it hold you back. Now you can't hide from it."

_to be continued..._


	5. who

title: Lost Happiness

author: melpomene blue

chapter: five

Eighteen weeks.

One hundred twenty six days.

Three thousand twenty-four hours.

One hundred eighty-one thousand, four hundred forty minutes.

Ten million, eight hundred eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds.

Maybe having her tablet so readily at hand wasn't such a great thing after all - with each simple computation her distress grew by leaps and bounds. She liked it better when she didn't know how long it had been, when the only measure of her time spent in the cave was a pile of pebbles she had refused to acknowledge or count, a pile of pebbles she had left behind in that cave along with all the nightmarish implications of counting down her final days. She liked it a lot better when she was ignorant.

John was still in the lair. He had refused to abandon her completely although he had moved off to sit at her bank of computers, allowing her some privacy in which to mull over the information he had provided. He looked busy but she was relatively certain it was all just an act for her benefit. She felt like she had been sucker punched and she couldn't decide if it was because she now knew how long she had been stuck down in that hellish cave or because John had deliberately given her the one piece of information she had openly admitted she didn't want to know.

"Why?"

John's head jerked back from the computer screen and, after pausing for a beat, he slowly turned the chair to face Felicity's bed. "Why..." His eyes were filled with questions but Felicity was relatively sure he knew what she was asking.

"Eighteen weeks..." She could feel her eyebrows draw together and her forehead furrow, she fought back against the tears that pricked at her eyes and threatened to fall. "Why did you wait so long to come for me?" Despite her determination to appear strong and untouched by it all, her voice betrayed her and broke when she asked the question she really hadn't intended to utter - ever.

He closed his eyes, the grim expression back solidly in place and becoming more grim as the seconds ticked by. "We looked everywhere as soon as we realized you were gone. We tore this city apart but they didn't leave behind any clues. They left nothing to give us any idea where to look next, where they had taken you or even who they were."

"Security cameras, traffic cams..." She wanted to believe him but it was proving to be a difficult thing to do.

He leaned forward in his seat. "...were all blank. For half an hour on that night every camera in the city quit working at exactly the same time. They had planned for every possibility. It was like...like you just disappeared into thin air. They left no trace to follow. Nothing."

She did her best to accept his words. "Then how..."

"It was a week after you were taken that we received the first clue."

She bit her lip. That first week had been so far beyond even what had been her worst idea of hell had once been that she had no desire to relive any of it, even in recollection. The physical scars that were left behind would provide plenty of memories as it was, the emotional scars...no one needed to know about those. No one _would_ know about those. All she had to do was keep her mouth shut – for once – and no one would be the wiser.

In spite of her determination to not remember, her mind's eye turned back to those early days. She had been so sure that Oliver and John would appear at any minute to rescue her. Every time the trapdoor would creak open, she would feel her heart race – not from fear of what was to come but from excitement at having been found. Every time she saw that is was her captors instead of her friends she would break just a little bit more.

She would have given them anything they asked for a single aspirin, she was in so much pain. She would have willingly died rather than betray her friends, but had her captors asked for any other information she would have gladly handed it over to them on a silver platter with sugar on top. She offered to hack anything they wanted: trust funds, retirement savings, banks, the treasury department at Fort Knox...anything. They never said a word.

It was maddening, their refusal to give her a way to relieve her own suffering, but it was only to grow progressively worse until she was literally begging for death, planning it out in her daydreams while she clutched her pet rock. Little tortures piled one on top of the other filled her waking and sleeping hours. The inventors of the Chinese water torture could take lessons from these guys, she decided in one of her more lucid moments. She could feel her mind slipping a little more sideways with each passing day. She wondered exactly how long it would take before her sanity was a thing of the past, a fleeting memory that would only serve to plague her nightmares.

She could focus on the experience as a whole atrocity but even in her thoughts she couldn't focus on the details without breaking out in a cold sweat and feeling her stomach quickly sour. There were some things that, even though she experienced them, she could never admit to having lived through. Some, well most, of the details could just remain secret. John and Oliver, she decided with grim determination, would just have to deal with her silence.

"Felicity!"

She jerked out of her thoughts, wondering how long she had zoned out. If John's expression was anything to go by, it had been a while. "Guess I got lost there for a minute."

"More like ten minutes."

"Oh. Sorry."

He shook his head. "No need. You've got a lot to process." He handed her a cup of lukewarm broth. "Wanna try something on your stomach?"

She sniffed it with disinterest. She knew she needed to eat something, the nutrients she was getting through the IV really weren't intended to keep her going for weeks on end, but her stress eating habits had abandoned her and every time she considered eating anything she would remember her captors' offerings. She took the cup, fighting to control the trembles that shook her hand. In an attempt to distract herself from the horror brought to mind by a simple cup of veggie broth, she ventured into slightly dangerous territory.

"Who was it? I mean, it doesn't really matter but...who would do this to me?"

John swallowed. "We haven't found out his true identity but he calls himself the Master."

"Haven't found out? As in, he's still out there somewhere?" The blind panic she had been able to keep relatively firmly in check threatened to bubble over and drown her. "You didn't catch him."

"You're safe, Felicity. There's no way anyone's going to get within a hundred yards of you without us knowing about it." He gently patted her shoulder, smoothing the soft, worn fabric of the T shirt she wore.

"But I was supposed to be safe before." She felt very much like a rat trapped in a maze except no treats waited behind the trick doors, only more horror. Fear surged wildly through her veins. "I was supposed to be safe before," she repeated, "and I wasn't. I haven't been safe since Oliver brought me that laptop with the stupid excuse that he'd spilled a latte on it. I knew what bullet holes looked like even then – even without any experience in seeing them up close and personal."

John only just managed to snag the cup of broth from her hand before she dropped it in her lap as she suddenly sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Although now out of traction, her leg kept her from trying to get completely out of bed. Even just sitting up, she was still extremely weak.

She wanted nothing so much as to be able to get up out of bed and go home. At home she had doors and locks and more than just a fleeting illusion of privacy. But with her abductor still lurking out there somewhere in the world...

Desperate to turn her thoughts away from all the things she couldn't have, she continued on her previous train of thought. "So this Master person, what's his MO? How did you figure out who it was?"

John rested his hand against her good leg, pressing lightly against her knee but not in any way that felt threatening. "That first clue we got was a statue. We received a few more before we finally managed to piece together all the clues and figure out what he was trying to tell us."

"Statues?"

John nodded. "It didn't make any sense at first. Oliver just kept receiving these obscure statues in unmarked packages that appeared on his desk. The security tapes always froze just prior to the box arriving and picked up again once it was left behind."

"What kind of statues?" The oddity was at least taking her mind off her current worries.

"Persephone, Alice in Wonderland... It took us a while to decipher the meaning at all – being trapped underground. We were afraid you had been buried alive until the statue of Merlin."

Felicity grew instantly confused.

"Not the Merly family, but Merlin from the King Arthur legends. According to our sources, legend says he was trapped in an underground cave from which he could never escape. We figured you were still alive but trapped in a cave somewhere."

She was duly impressed. "Not bad."

"Well, we got a lot of help from Quentin Lance. Now, I'd appreciate it if you actually tried to drink some of this," he handed the broth back to her, "rather than try to dump it in your lap."

She eyes the cup of broth dubiously. "I'll try?"

"That's all I ask." He leaned forward and lightly kissed her hairline.

_to be continued... _


	6. where

title: Lost Happiness

author: Melpomene Blue

chapter: six

By the time Oliver returned to the lair, Felicity had given up trying to drink any of the broth. Her throat fought against every attempt and once she was able to finally make herself swallow any of it at all, it simply refused to stay down. She tried again with the same results only to push away the cup and the small waste can Digg held ready for her rebelling stomach. Shaking her head, she had eased her legs back up onto the bed and sunk back into the pillows, depression weighing her down much more heavily than her rapidly decreasing body weight. She was so very tired. So exhausted. Allowing her eyes to close, she listened to Oliver's footfalls as he descended the stairs and feigned sleep.

"How is she?"

"She's resting. She needs time, Oliver," he responded softly. "Just give her time. She's got a lot to deal with."

The silence that followed John's response was heavy. There was no question what looks were passing between the two men – she had worked with them for far too long not to know them that well. She kept her eyes shut. She needed no evidence to prove she was right.

Oliver's voice was hushed but his tone was heavy. "I know that but we need to find him."

"Yeah, but I'm not going to ask that of her and neither are you. She's been back for what, two weeks? You're not going to have her running her traces and searches on the man who tortured her less than a month ago. She needs time. She deserves to have time to recover. We're going to have to find him on our own."

"I'm not trying to force her to do anything she's not ready for. I would never do that."

"I know you don't want to hurt her any more but intentionally or not, that's exactly what you're doing. The entire time she was missing, all we could think of was getting her back. Now that we've got her, all _you_ talk about is finding him so we can exact revenge. I don't blame you, I want to string the guy up by his own entrails myself, but even considering asking her to help us find the man who abducted her is not going to help her recovery." He paused a beat. "I know you care about her. I know you're worried about her. You should be worried and you should care. But as far as finding him goes, we'll just have to track him down on our own without her help. We managed to find _her_, didn't we? We'll find the Master too and then he'll be made to pay for his crimes against her...one by one."

"It took us so long to find her...we almost failed. We nearly lost her. That cave was too close to being her grave. And with the Master threatening to take her again... She won't survive another ordeal like that. If we lose her...we can't lose her. It cannot happen."

It took all of her will power to not react to that gem of news. The fact that she had been close to dying was nothing new to her, that much she had been painfully aware of, but another threat of abduction... She had known they were hiding something but she had assumed it had something to do with her previous abduction not the all too real risk of being taken again. She worked to keep her breathing calm and steady, not wanting to alert either of them to her wakefulness. There was no way she was going to be able to fool herself into going back to sleep now. She continued to listen even as the conversation faded to silence and both men walked away, John to the computers and Oliver to the salmon ladder. Her mind was racing with pure terror, her will power straining to keep the pure panic at bay. Long minutes later, when she was certain the two men on residence were otherwise occupied, she opened her eyes and stared at her hands.

There were marks on her hands, pairs of puncture marks, six that she could see. She could remember being hit with the stun gun, repeatedly, more times than she could count, many more times than she wished to remember. She could recall throwing up her hand in a vain attempt to ward off the assaults that would periodically come from the trapdoor far above her head. Her captors never missed their target. Back in that hellish hole in the ground, she could remember thinking, after the pain had receded to a dull roaring in her veins, that she had been unaware that the prongs of a stun gun could reach so far with such accuracy. There were more marks beneath the downy bandages, similar puncture marks on the rest of her body from her neck to her feet. Marks that could be easily cataloged and counted and provide definitive proof of the assaults. Marks she would just as soon forget existed. Memories she would just as soon banish to the realm of forgotten experiences.

She studied the marks until she could no longer bear the sight of her own body, until she could think of nothing but how wonderful it would be to rip the skin from her bones so there would be no more physical evidence to count, no memories to lurk in the dark corners of her brain and haunt her sleeping and waking hours relentlessly. In a desperate plea to turn her thoughts and drag her memory out of that cave, she buried her hands in the blankets and cleared her throat. Two pair of eyes instantly turned toward her.

"Felicity, are you alright?"

She shrugged an answer to Oliver's question. "Where was I and how did you find me? I mean, I'm pretty sure whoever it was that took me didn't leave a trail of breadcrumbs for you or a great big X to mark the spot you were looking for."

Oliver and John studied one another for a moment before attempting an answer.

Diggle followed Oliver as he crossed the distance to her bed. "I explained to her about the first three statues."

"The first three told us you were underground, the fourth told us where but it took us a while to decipher the real meaning."

She nodded silently and ran the tip of her tongue across her healing lips. The skin was still torn and chapped but they felt better than they had in weeks. Lip balm could be an amazing thing. "Persephone, Alice, and Merlin. What was the fourth?"

"Empress Josephine," John replied.

That didn't make any sense to her. "Empress Josephine...as in Napoleon's wife?"

"One and the same."

She could feel her forehead furrow. "How did that tell you where I was? I can't have been in France."

John took up the explanation. "You weren't. The statue was a very specific one, a very well known defaced statue. At least it's well known in Martinique where, several years ago, the full scale version had its head knocked off and was doused with red paint. Apparently Josephine was born on Martinique where her family owned a sugar plantation, she grew up there and didn't leave for France until she was sixteen. Once we were able to track down the source of the statue, it was only a matter of finding the right series of caves. It turns out that Martinique has a lot of caves."

Felicity allowed that to run through her thoughts several times before her mind veered wildly off course. If the man who had taken her was still out there in the world, if her was threatening to abduct her again, then she couldn't go home. Home was where he had found her to begin with. Locked windows and doors would not keep him and his nightmares at bay, they could offer no safety. Home. She missed home. After so many weeks, she didn't even know if she had a home any longer...

"You do. I hired a maid to look after things for you while you were gone. She's there once a week to dust, vacuum, the usual. We also made sure your utilities and rent were paid. But I don't think it's a good idea for you to try to go back home just yet."

She looked up at Oliver, wondering exactly how much of her internal dialogue she had said aloud. It would seem that she had only vocalized the last part, the worry about her apartment being lost. She hadn't meant to voice any of it. She dropped her gaze back down to her lap, watching the blankets move as she fidgeted with the fabric. "My place probably looks better than it has since I moved in."

"No. It's just an empty shell."

"I always wanted to vacation on Martinique. It was one of those places that sounded too beautiful to be real: tropical, exquisite, exotic. Martinique, Barbados, Antigua... I don't want to see any of them anymore. He took that away from me and I don't know how to get it back. I don't even know if I want to get it back. When I left Las Vegas for college I had plans to spend as much time out of the desert as possible but all I managed to do was spend my life in an office building. Those trips to Russia and Lian Yu, those were the closest things I ever had to a vacation. I had always meant to go, you know, somewhere - anywhere. But I got wrapped up in my job and then in Arrow business." She let silence fill the room. "I should have gone before... How can I ever go to the Caribbean now without remembering being in that cave, dying?" She raised her eyes again to meet Oliver's just before he closed his, an unnamed emotion flickering across his features.

She watched him reach out and touch her, gently squeezing his fingers against her emaciated shoulder. She could feel his strength behind the gentle gesture as well as his pain and worry. It helped to ease her own worries even if it didn't sweep them completely away.

"Um... I know this is completely off topic but I was wondering, do you think we could dye my hair sometime soon? I know it's not really a priority, it's just that I probably don't even look like myself anymore. I'd like it if I felt more like myself."

Oliver leaned over to place a kiss along her hairline, a smile beginning to soften his expression. "You look beautiful, Felicity. But yes, we can find someone to dye your hair for you."

"Thanks. And maybe I could have some of my own clothes?"

"Anything else?"

She shook her head slowly, not quite able to force a smile. "I'll let you know if I think of anything."

"You do that."


End file.
